Silver Eve
by Poecilia
Summary: 28 Weeks Later setting, the future Patient Zero wanders back into her old house and meets the worst enemy she's ever faced: her own mind.
1. Day 1 to Day 3

Disclaimer: The characters and setting of _28 Days/Weeks Later_ belong to Alex Garland, Juan Fresnadillo, and Enrique Lopez-Lavigne. This is a work of fanfiction published without profit or intent of copyright infringement, so please don't sue I love you guys. Poems are by the poets, but mostly just stuck in there to space the entries.

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_And death shall have no dominion._

_Dead men naked they shall be one_

_With the man in the wind and the west moon;_

_When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,_

_They shall have stars at elbow and foot;_

_-- Dylan Thomas_

Day 1

Now that she was back in her home, Alice resolved not to come out. It was worse, somehow, to wander the empty city. There was the way her imagination summoned demons out from every corner, and then the undeniably real way that death assaulted her senses. The corpses: the way they lay told her of lives interrupted, and with what violence they were stolen away. Their resting places had no peace, or respect, and what with them just left lying there spoiling above ground, the _smell _…

They'd all been abandoned: these corpses, this city, and her. It was wrong.

In her attic, she found the place to say her prayers for them. A cross, drawn in yellow chalk on the wall, for each body she saw. Here it was quiet, safe. That should have been enough: she wasn't about to go out looking for more, it was getting dark. Still, to task herself with memorializing all these people, and leaving it half-done because she was afraid, reminded her… of what she wouldn't be reminded about anymore.

Could she understand that kind of cowardice, now?

_Yes._

_No._

She didn't sleep, gazing at the graveyard wall until the half-moon rose and with its light seemed to bleach the chalk. Alice found herself humming a lullaby: she just couldn't help being everyone's mother.

_His vanity requires no response,_

_And makes a welcome of indifference._

_(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all_

_Enacted on this same divan or bed;_

_I who have sat by Thebes below the wall_

_And walked among the lowest of the dead.)_

_Bestows one final patronizing kiss,_

_And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . ._

_-- T.S. Eliot_

Day 2

She locked the house up, even though she hadn't really encountered any of the Infected since leaving the woods. There was nothing to board up the windows with, though, so she found herself more on edge than she expected.

Their refrigerator hadn't been running for ages – she could hardly recognize what the leftovers were supposed to be, or what they'd turned into… not that she tried very hard to, they were really disgusting, but she expected memories of the house—normal, comforting memories— to come welcome her. That didn't happen. She started cleaning.

Closing the fridge door, she paused— at the picture magnet-held there, a picture of her son. She hadn't brought any pictures when she escaped to Sally and Geoff's, and she moved to take this one— _take it, where? Silly. This is your home._

There was still running water, but it sounded so much like animalistic hissing, or the alarming rustling of leaves, that it was more upsetting than relieving to wash up. She tried not to think about it, but kept muttering "Get off me, get off me," at nobody in particular, and dressed hurriedly.

She found some canned soup in the cupboard, without briefly remembering how she prepared the meals at Sally's on Thursdays. So she avoided wondering if today was Thursday, or at how she'd forgotten how to keep civilized time anymore, instead learning to watch the moon. A true, short, month could still be surprisingly changeable.

But Alice told herself she was too hungry and tired to think any of this. She even, afterwards, wandered into her room, fell into the bed she used to share for eighteen years with somebody she wouldn't be reminded about, and slept without a problem.

_I stand amid the roar _

_Of a surf-tormented shore,_

_And I hold within my hand _

_Grains of the golden sand_

_How few! yet how they creep_

_Through my fingers to the deep,_

_While I weep -- while I weep!_

_-- Edgar Allan Poe_

Day 3

Well, there was a small problem: no dreams. She remembered staring at the back of her eyelids all night — knowing she was asleep because her breathing was comfortably slow, and her body felt rested enough upon waking, but inside she was numb.

_This is not a dream that she is awake, but a dream while she is awake. Out of habit, or a want to return to habit, she goes to Tammy's room to tidy things up, but her daughter is suddenly there and saying, "Don't put the shoes away yet, Mum, I haven't decided--"_

_And she knows, in the way people can be deluded in dreams, that it's a perfectly ordinary day and her daughter is readying for a date._

_"Must be someone special," Alice teases, "You never have this much trouble choosing what to wear."_

_Tam looks sourly at her slippers, identically styled but one is red and the other white._

_Then someone starts hammering and shouting at the door._

_"Is that him? He sounds… excited," says Alice._

_"Sam?" whispers Tammy, walking to the window and drawing back the curtain… but it isn't her voice. It isn't her daughter—her daughter would never do something that stupid. It's Karen, and she's best left alone to whinge really. Alice turns away._

_A crash, and the room floods with light, and screaming—_

She stopped her cleaning then, and took to carrying the last few cans of food from the cupboard to the attic, and some things from her room on the way. She had but three coherent thoughts.

Firstly, if she hadn't been annoyed at Karen that day, she could have kept the girl from checking the windows and they would probably still be safe.

Secondly, it was too late to be sorry, and useless to keep brooding about it because she was back in civilization and starting over as best she could.

Thirdly, she was suddenly and absolutely terrified of sunlight and nothing could bring her to stay downstairs with all the windows and those stupid glass doors not boarded up.

"There's nobody to clean up for, anyway, really," she said, taking the framed picture of Andy, Tammy, and herself from her bedside table (and she honestly didn't knock her husband's photo aside on purpose, let alone with anything related to an overwhelming pain of betrayal.) She wasn't home, home was _safe_.

There were a lot of bodies outside… enough to wear that first stump of chalk she found, to its last grains. Taking a charcoal pencil instead, she added black crosses to the graveyard wall in the attic, sobbing her apologies to Karen, and Sally, and Geoff, and Jacob. (And Sam, but hoping a cross for him wouldn't be a jinx. She didn't see him, living among the wild infected.) They probably wouldn't have gotten along otherwise, but she never wanted to kill them.

_Can we rest now?_ she asked of all the tiny crosses, _Or have I made a graveyard full of ghosts?_


	2. Day 7 to Day 12

_Yes, better the Devil's crimson room_

_and the Devil's heated laughter,_

_than that awful cold outside that door_

_and silence, forever after._

_-- Peg Howard_

Day 7

After a week of daymares and blank nights, Alice's mind finally caught up to her body. It was a New Moon's night, and no electricity, no visible difference between the back of her eyelids and the room. Eventually the smears of color that crawled across her vision, faded away… and in came the panting, the growling, the rank smell of blood, heavy quick footsteps, and grabbing, and clawing.

She couldn't see anything. How many were there? How did they get in? She couldn't move, her sleeping body breathing too gently and evenly to scream, her arms and legs felt set in iron. It was like some horrible mirror-condition of sleepwalking: she was awake wasn't she, why couldn't she move?

A sudden heat washed over her— too hot to be blood, fluid but not wet… no, it was fire, by its sudden light she could see there was only one Infected with her, and it was herself. This self floated deathly still above (or was she the one floating?) but both eyes were brown. No. Not brown, just dark—so dark they seemed to have been gouged out. The flames spread.

She awoke gasping, trembling, with terror.

And fever.

_I was angry with my friend:_

_I told my wrath, my wrath did end._

_I was angry with my foe:_

_I told it not, my wrath did grow._

_-- William Blake_

Day 12

It began with a fever, then for two days she found herself salivating more than she could swallow, and on the third day felt all her insides begin twisting. Not just in her chest and gut—but the muscles in her arms and legs, and her tendons. The shivering developed into seizures, and the pain was excruciating.

"It should happen quicker," Alice remarked from outside herself, but both i her eyes were blue, and she was beyond calm—almost dead to expression—while Alice herself was close to screaming. "Less than half a minute, maybe, but not an incubation period of weeks and then symptoms stretched over days. Could be, you caught the flu or something from somewhere and that's weakened you for the… other, nasty sickness. Which we know isn't gone."

Alice herself tremulously rubbed the teethmarks on her upper arm and shook her head.

"You should have killed him the moment you saw his eyes change."

"It was a kid," Alice hissed through the pain, "just a kid… take that face off, you're not me."

Her blue-eyed self put on a mocking, raspy gurgle: "Yess, Preciouss. First they cheat you—hurt you—lie. We survived because of me! Um," she cleared her throat, and said more conversationally, "Did that sound more Yoda than Gollum?"

Alice looked askance and shook her head, muttering, "I've gone mad."

"Oh? All right. What about her?" blue-eyed Alice pointed to the wild, snarling Alice who prowled the rest of the attic, seeping blood out of wild umber eyes.

Alice herself cried out and forced herself to scramble backwards against the corner. How could she expect to avoid her Self, though? _I'm sick, but not tired,_ she realized then, _and the pain's not so bad when you move. _She crawled, forced herself to stand, to stumble towards her dark-eyed self and see which one of them was stronger—

"Besides," her blue-eyed self continued, "I wasn't talking about the kid."

Alice turned and screamed, "I don't want to think about him!"

"Don't think about it, that's his way, even before the plague," her blue-eyed self continued, "You saw his cowardly eyes, his pathetic apologetic smile…"

"Stop."

"… wasn't new, let's face it. Don't you want to show him what he's finally done to you?"

Alice paced opposite her dark-eyed self, who snuffed the air and snarled. To her surprise, she growled in return. Which one of them was stronger? A silly question now, for when ever were they separate?

"Say his name, Alice. Say your husband's name."

She did, not a desperate plea but a syllable so dangerously edged that she hardly recognized it. The rage took her over, then the world blurred… if she could say his name, she could face the sunlight, could do anything. It was an ecstatic release, letting her true predatory nature carry her through the day for once, for always.

A movement caught her attention, and she leaped at it— beating, clawing, vomiting blood, and everything she meant to say was lost in her screaming.

Until she saw through the sticky crimson smears… a pair of eyes, one brown and the other blue.

"Andy?" "_Good._" "No, God, did I--?" "_Hate!_"

"That's as far as we can take it for now," her blue-eyed self interrupted.

True, the rage was draining (_how disappointing._) When she stepped back, so did her victim. She frowned, closed her mismatched eyes for a moment, and looked again.

She'd attacked the mirror.


	3. Day 15 to Day 28

_Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,_

_And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,_

_Do not go gentle into that good night._

Day 15

_Andy_, she wrote on the graveyard wall (sloppily, her hands still hurt,) and under that _Tammy_. They weren't dead, so they shouldn't have crosses—but she needed to mark what she meant for them. If she finally died here, something ought to indicate that they were remembered… she seemed to do nothing but remember them, miss them. And fear: if her infection flared up again, she knew, they would still be remembered. She'd hunt them down.

Encircling both their names, Alice prayed desperately that they would be kept as safe.

Then she drew another black cross, for Don.

"Oh, no," Alice said, dusting her hands off, "he's 'dead to me'? That's just so—" she interrupted: "I didn't ask your opinion, you're not even real, I shouldn't be talking to you." Stolidly, "No, listen: I can't leave it at that last day, I just can't. Think of how much it must have torn him up inside, when the fear went away and he realized what he did. He must be sorry," Echoed, "_Must_ be." Coldly: "...I need to give him hope for forgiveness. He deserves that, everyone does." A thoughtful gaze that was truly Alice, then guardedly expressionless again, "I need to tell him I love him, one last time…" and the other her's placid face, for once, gave way to a fey smile, "Then watch him bleed."

"What, spontaneously? That's likely." Alice flinched and massaged her stomach. Her insides felt like a violin played pizzicato as they untwisted. Was it over? Was she well? "And what do you think we deserve? Anybody can reveal their cowardice in a moment, but to plan..."

Her other self replied with a stony silence that Alice herself understood intuitively: _We survived. Fighting, not running. Don't be ungrateful for that._

"I am."

_Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight_

_Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,_

_Rage, rage against the dying of the light. _

Day 21

The full moon shone bright as a strobe through the boards blocking the window. It had been about a month, then, since she left the woods.

Those woods… gods, almost half a year of running scared, through the winter, struggling to get by, and then learning to beat Them. Figuring out how to hide, how to catch one apart from the rest, or set traps. And killing them, even if they were stronger, faster, vicious. Even if she knew their face. A split tree branch through the torso, or cracking their heads with a rock while their arms were caught in a lasso.

One night, when the moon shone like this one, she faced the last of the Infected. The sound of leaves rustling was too subtle and focused to be a group, and she stalked towards it.

The little boy she let in the day they were attacked, looked up at her: he was now red-eyed and drooling blood. She hesitated. It was almost fatal, but Alice dodged just enough that he missed her neck and caught his teeth in her left upper-arm instead. She didn't scream or cry out, half a year of this pushed her far past that. She simply woke out of her soft, civilized remorse (_the boy raised his head and hissed_) in a moment got her other arm around his tiny head and, with a grunt at the effort, snapped it around.

Her hands weren't even shaking afterwards. Her expression, probably impassive. Yet high in her head she could hear herself thinking, _Andy, do you know what I can do? Can you see what I've become?_ And she slowly, slowly clawed at her face in muted horror, staining red where she would otherwise look angelic in the light of the silver eve.

_Do not go gentle into that good night._

_Rage, rage against the dying of the light._

_-- Dylan Thomas_

Day 28

She hasn't moved since remembering. Worms fester in her untouched bowl of food, the attic dust falls and stains the sweat on her face, and she dreams one last time...

She's on a train, but instead of landscapes outside it's her memories. The good ones -- well, ordinary ones, that are treasured now but she took for granted then. She presses her hands against the window like a child, watching her life flash before her eyes -- calm, even happy. Then the lights go out.

_The voices tell her she's dangerous, the visions convince her she's helpless, but it's the tactile memories (vivid enough to be hallucinated) that she can't take any more: trapped, surrounded, hit, dragged, bitten— a blur of her own instinct and logic, and a bare-handed murder._

The lights flicker back on.

"Am I dead? If I'm dead, I'm not going to heaven," she mumbles as they pull into a station.

"The last stop is the city of Eden," a fellow commuter supplies helpfully, before stepping out and leaving her alone.

"Oh, good," she says. Her son is waiting on the bench in the station. She sees his face as he sees her, and knows: she doesn't have to go anywhere.


End file.
